How to Roll a Joint

By Malia Wollan

May 20, 2015

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CreditIllustration by Radio

After he sold his cable-­television firm for $18 million in 1999, Bruce Nassau was a wealthy man looking for a new industry. He wanted to invest in a product with broad consumer appeal. Eventually, he settled on marijuana. “I’m an old guy in this business,” says Nassau, 62, the chief executive of Tru Cannabis, a company with five marijuana dispensaries in the Denver area and plans to expand within Colorado and to four other states. Last year, the company’s sales reached $10 million.

Nassau started smoking joints as a teenager in Chicago, and he figured he knew the ins and outs of weed consumption. But joints, it turned out, were a bit old-­fashioned — the meatloaf of marijuana — and young people had all sorts of newfangled ways to ingest the stuff. Chief among them are “dabbing” (a means of inhaling smoke from resinous hash oil) and “vaping” (heating marijuana and breathing in vapor rather than smoke, often done with so-­called vape pens). When more youthful smokers did roll joints, they tended to roll unfamiliarly large ones, often in cigar wrappers, and call them blunts. “I had to learn a whole new vocabulary,” Nassau says.

While he understands the appeal of these methods (“They get you real stoned real quick”), Nassau, like many of his baby-­boomer customers, prefers an old-­school joint. Making one is “ritualistic and relaxing,” and you don’t need specialized gear. He also likes handling plant material, rather than resinous concentrate. Tru Cannabis sells individual joints for $6, $8 or $9 in its shops, but Nassau says rolling is an easy skill to acquire.

“Go back to basics,” he says. Crush your marijuana buds into uniform bits with your fingers or in a grinder device, which Nassau says works “like a pepper mill.” Take one sheet of rolling paper and fold it in half with the gum strip facing up. Sprinkle the marijuana evenly into the paper’s crease, avoiding the edges. Begin rolling back and forth with your thumbs and index fingers until you have a cylindrical shape. Wet the sugar gum with your tongue, and seal it tight. “Don’t overdo it with the licking,” warns Nassau, as too much saliva dissolves the paper. At first, your joints will be lumpy and crude. Nassau says to keep practicing until you can roll one effortlessly in about a minute.

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